


Satellite Mind

by lovetincture



Series: One of Her Kind [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abigail Hobbs Lives, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode Fix-It: s02e13 Mizumono, F/M, M/M, Masturbation, Murder Family, POV Abigail Hobbs, Pining, Unrequited Crush, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-25 00:44:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20367835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: She feels like this isn’t something she’s supposed to see, so of course she watches anyway. It doesn’t matter. They’ve gotten sucked into that weird private vortex they have, where the only thing that exists is each other. They don’t hug, or kiss, or touch or do anything normal. They just sort of stare at each other. Hannibal looks at Will like he’s the whole world, and Abigail ignores the jab of pique she feels.Abigail loves her new family and their life in Italy. She isn't jealous, except sometimes she is.





	Satellite Mind

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is all [tei's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tei) fault for giving me all these Murder Family feels.

Abigail was right.

She was right about how it ends. It does end in blood. She was wrong to feel sorry for Will, though, because the ending is his fault. Hannibal gave him so many  _ chances.  _ So many chances, and he lied and lied. He threw them all away one by one, burned them like matches.

Abigail wouldn’t have.

And yet it barely matters what she would or wouldn’t have done. They were supposed to leave together, but Hannibal decides it should be all or nothing. They’ll be a family together or they’ll be nothing at all. He kills Will first, because of course he does.

Abigail isn’t afraid of death, but she does want to live.

“Abigail, come to me,” Hannibal says.

She looks at his outstretched hand, red and unmoving. Impatience simmering below the surface, a maelstrom in his eyes. Will whimpers and bleeds out on the kitchen floor—she’d washed it just the other day, and now it’s sticky and stained.

“No,” Will says. The word bubbles up wet with blood, high and thin and look how he loves her.

Abigail looks at Hannibal, who looks at Will. She shakes her head. She doesn’t move.

Except he’s not  _ looking at her, _ so he doesn’t see it. So she says, “No.” Then she says, “Dad.”

It’s cheap. Sentimental. It probably won’t work. She would like not to die.

He looks at her, a predator turning toward the sound of movement more than a father turning toward a child. For a moment there’s nothing but hunger. Nothing but bloodlust. She  _ sees _ him, and it’s beautiful. He is beautiful. Then it clears and resolves. His face settles into something hurt but human. It’s so disappointing.

“Abigail,” he says again, his hand still reaching.

She won’t make him chase her down. His fingers close around hers, and he helps her across the slippery floor. She thinks about saying goodbye to Will, but she doesn’t know how. It’s easier not to look, to pretend he’s invisible.

Outside the rains soaks them both, and she steps over Doctor Bloom. Hannibal is quiet until he isn’t. He comes back to life on the plane, telling her about Paris and Florence and all the places they’ll see. The places he’d like to take her. She thinks about Marisa—Marisa bragging about her family’s summer vacation in Spain while Abigail was so jealous, and she thinks  _ eat your heart out. _ She settles back in her seat with a sigh.

When Abigail looks at Hannibal, he smiles, except when he’s asleep. His dreams look troubled, and he twitches and grimaces. Abigail finds it unsettling, so she stops looking. She pushes the button between their seats to turn off his overhead light. She looks out the window and daydreams about France.

* * *

Palermo is hot and glittering, and Abigail loves it. They get in a cab when their plane touches down, like they have every time before. But instead of taking them to yet another hotel, this time the cab drops them off in front of a house in the city. Hannibal leans over and pays the driver, exchanging a few words too fast for her to understand. She hefts her bag onto her shoulder and follows Hannibal as he opens the door and lets them in.

They don’t leave again. Hannibal tutors her in Italian and kills a university professor. He lets Abigail help mix the cement when they bury him. She doesn’t speak the language well enough to get a job, no matter what her forged visa says, so she spends most of her days reading and surfing the web. She blasts music too loud whenever Hannibal’s gone, fills the house with noise and light.

They have sex once. She’s tipsy, flushed from a glass of pretty pink wine at dinner. They’re doing the dishes together: Hannibal washing, her drying. It’s so easy to tip forward and tip her head up. Easy to press her lips against his and slide her eyes shut.

He’s not surprised. Not even for a moment. He doesn’t blink or pause, just kisses her back like he’s been waiting for her. His hands come up to frame her face, warm from the hot water and damp on her cheeks. It feels like crying, and it makes her shiver. He pushes her hair behind one ear, strokes the crest of it with a rough thumb. Brushes against the matching lack on the other side before sliding his hand to cradle the back of her skull. She moans when she thinks about how easily he could crack it.

He kisses her thoroughly, until she’s breathless. His tongue is clever as it plays against hers. His free hand wanders under her blouse, pinches at her nipples until they peak, until she’s wet and aching. Then he takes her to bed.

It’s good—it’s better than good. Compared to the backseat fumbling she’s tried in the past, this might as well be seeing God—but the look on his face is awful. She gets off, comes around his fingers and his tongue, then his cock, and he looks…  _ polite. _ Considerate.

He is nothing but kind to her and dead-eyed as a snake, and it turns her stomach.

They never do it again. She never invites it, and he doesn’t reach for her. She’s happy she knows, she guesses, in the same way she’s happy to know all terrible things. In the way it’s better to see the knife before it cuts you (but better still to be the one holding it).

Abigail still doesn’t want to be loved—she likes that he doesn’t—but she wouldn’t mind being wanted.

* * *

Will comes back to them. She knew he would. He’s one of their kind, and he has their scent now. It takes a long time, though. It takes several months where Hannibal explains what the doctors will do to him, how they’ll stuff his insides back where they belong, stitch him up, detain him for questioning. He tells her about fluid drains and antibiotics and how Will’s body is knitting itself back together day by day.

Hannibal leaves him a bloody valentine. They’d hunted the man together, a man who’d looked a little bit but not enough like Will. It reminds her of her dad, and Abigail’s tongue is coated with thick jealousy. She sees the valentine in the morning papers.

By the time Will shows up on their front porch carrying a knife and wearing murder on his face, Abigail has learned enough to say, ‘What took you so long?’ in Italian.

Will does not speak Italian, but he makes a choked little noise when he sees her.

“Abigail,” he says. He doesn’t drop the knife, but he folds it. Puts it back in his pocket.

“Hi,” she says. She chews on the end of her hair. It’s a habit Hannibal doesn’t like, which is why she keeps doing it. “D’you want to come in?”

Will nods, and Abigail swings the door wide. Stands aside to let him in. He crosses the threshold and Abigail watches him take it in. She feels a small swell of proprietary pride as she imagines how he must see it—how she saw it the first time. It’s very pretty, with the crystal chandelier and tidy white tiles, and a staircase reaching up toward their bedrooms with a slick, shiny banister on either side. He looks a little awed. Or tired. Abigail isn’t great with faces.

“Nice, huh?” She grins, and he smiles back, a slow and halting thing.

She’s going to give him a tour, going to plop his bag on the slippery marble floor and wave him into the hallway when he sucks in a shocked, quiet breath and his body goes tense all over.

She isn’t great with faces, but she knows that one.

“Hannibal,” he says.

“Will.”

Hannibal is standing in the hallway with a perfect white kitchen towel slung over his shoulder. He was in the middle of cooking dinner. She can smell it burning in the kitchen.

She feels like this isn’t something she’s supposed to see, so of course she watches anyway. It doesn’t matter. They’ve gotten sucked into that weird private vortex they have, where the only thing that exists is each other.

They don’t hug, or kiss, or touch or do anything normal. They just sort of stare at each other. Hannibal looks at Will like he’s the whole world, and Abigail ignores the jab of pique she feels. Hannibal reaches out to hover his hand over Will’s stomach, over the scar they all know is there. No one moves. They breathe each other in.

Abigail stays long enough to feel like she’s won or proven something, and then she goes. Her shoes click on the floor, and nobody notices but her.

It would be polite to take Will’s bag upstairs, so of course she doesn’t.

* * *

There are three bedrooms in this house. Hannibal had claimed the master bedroom for himself and told Abigail she could have her pick of the remaining two. She picked the one with the view of the ocean. It’s filled with buttery yellow sunlight every afternoon, and Abigail loves to sit on the windowsill and bask in it. The salt air smells clean and bright, and sometimes at night she hears the tolling of fog bells.

The day Will arrives, he and Hannibal disappear for the rest of the afternoon. Abigail falls asleep and wakes to find the house painted in the moody blue hues of twilight. All the lights in the house are off save a sliver coming from beneath Hannibal’s door. She can hear the low drone of hushed voices.

She’s hungry, and it’s late, so she pads her way down the stairs and into the kitchen. The whole house smells like charred fish, and she sees the culprit immediately, an abandoned pan on the stove filled with what would have been dinner. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen Hannibal waste food before, doesn’t think she’s ever seen him skip a meal.

She tips the pan into the trash and tries not to think about it, scrapes the burnt, blackened oil away and watches it drizzle thickly into the trashbag. She sets it in the sink to soak and scrubs at it before anything has had a chance to loosen.

Abigail works the scorched flesh free with a scouring brush, rubbing so viciously that she tears her thumbnail. She curses and sucks her thumb into her mouth, ignoring the bitterness of soap, the film of rancid oil.

She takes a deep breath and counts to three. Begins again, more gently this time. Scrubs until the pan is shining and silver once more, then carefully dries it and sets it back in the cabinet.

She likes to think she’s still her own person, still her father’s daughter—she is, but that just means more things these days. She’s begun to see the beauty in order, in setting everything right and having everything in its place. The pan resting clean and dry in the cabinet feels right.

Her family together under one roof again, that’s right. She holds on to it.

Abigail makes herself a peanut butter sandwich and brings it upstairs on a paper towel, just like her mom used to when she was home sick from school, back when sandwiches came with forehead kisses and long, soothing strokes against her hair.

She’ll probably get crumbs under the covers.

Hannibal would hate it, but then, she’s still her father’s daughter. The other one. The dead one.

* * *

The third bedroom remains unused.

Abigail goes to sit in it sometimes. She creeps through the house on silent feet, opens the door, and slips her way inside. The room is adjacent to Hannibal’s, and she can hear them if she presses her ear to the wall. She can’t hear words, doesn’t know what they’re saying, but she can make out the quiet rumble of voices—signs of life.

She makes up the things they might say. They talk about the weather, how they like Italy in the fall. Will likes it, but he misses his home in Virginia. Hannibal promises to make it up to him, to make this place feel just the same. They talk about her, she imagines. They say how glad they are to have her, what a good daughter she is. They’re plan a family hunting trip, and they’ll surprise her in the morning.

Sometimes their conversations aren’t conversations at all. Some nights there’s the slap of skin on skin, rough groans and fevered pleas. Will begs sometimes. Sometimes  _ Hannibal _ begs. She gasps the first time she hears it, claps a hand over her mouth although there’s no way they can hear her, not really. Not through the wall, not over their racket.

She unbuttons her jeans and slips her hand inside, sighs quietly when her fingers make contact with heated flesh. She presses, just holding herself there.

_ Please, _ Hannibal says through drywall. There’s a slap and a groan.

_ Hannibal, _ Will says.  _ Hannibal, fuck. _

_ Darling— _

Abigail rubs herself in time to the rhythm of the headboard knocking against the wall. She has a distant notion that it would be nice to come at the same time (all together,  _ like a family), _ but she finishes after they do, imagines them lying skin to sticky skin and bites her lips so hard she tastes blood when she comes.

She licks her hands clean and buttons her jeans. She slips out of the room and into the hallway, half wishing someone would catch her for what she’s done.

No one does.

She’ll look at herself in the mirror in the morning, turn a critical eye to the bruise on her lip and cover it with lipstick. Hannibal will compliment her on the color, and Will will say she looks pretty. She’ll keep wearing it long after the wound has healed.

She doesn’t do it again, but she hopes Hannibal goes into that room. Hopes it smells of her and sex.

She’d love to fuck them, but she won’t ask for it. She won’t ever ask. It hurts sometimes that they are in the light together, and she’s huddled in the dark alone.

* * *

Sometimes she feels less like one of their kind and more like a cuckoo dropped in the nest. They’re kind to her, unfailingly kind. They pass the meat at dinner and their fingers brush hers. It’s never on purpose. It’s always because they’re staring at each other, a sun and a moon reflecting the light.

She grips her knife too tightly and stabs her plate with too much force. Metal tines scrape against porcelain, the sound cutting through conversation. Hannibal looks disapproving. Will looks concerned.

She isn’t quite rude enough to leave dinner before it’s finished—doesn’t have that kind of death wish—but she’s quiet for the rest of it. She pushes her chair out and excuses herself as soon as the plates are cleared. Abigail finds her way up the stairs, pauses at the door to her room and turns left instead of right. She sits in the empty room with the light turned out, listening to the quiet sound of her own breathing. She closes her eyes and leans her head against the wall.

She does not cry. She thinks about it, though.

Abigail isn’t at all surprised when a sliver of light from the hallway cuts across her darkened haven. She slits her eyes against the sudden glare. Will shuts the door behind him and takes a seat next to her on the ground. He doesn’t speak for a while.

“It’s peaceful in here,” he says. “Quiet.”

“Yup.”

She hears him lean his head back, a quiet thump as it settles against the wall. He moves more slowly these days. “When I lived in Wolf Trap, before. Before all of this, I used to go walking at night, through the fields behind my house. I’d leave the lights on. There’s something that feels safe about being on the outside looking in.”

She doesn’t plan on talking to him, doesn’t want to talk about it, but Will is good at this. Good at drawing people out and making them think it was their idea. She’s seen him do it to Hannibal, too, and it turns out she’s not immune.

“Lonely, too,” she says.

“It can be, sometimes.” He huffs a small laugh. “I always liked being alone. But you don’t have to stay outside, Abigail. The house is for you too. We’re here when you’re tired of running through the fields.”

_ You’re not, _ she wants to say.  _ Not like I want you to be. _ But he’s trying to be nice, and he found her in the dark. She can try to be nice too. She walks her fingers forward and finds his hand already reaching out, open on the carpet, waiting. She tucks her hand into his, and his grip is warm and steady. It feels like an anchor.

They sit there in the quiet and the dark for a long, long time.

**Author's Note:**

> Come scream about these characters with me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture) (talking in an inside voice is totally okay too). You can also check out my [original work](http://hopezane.com) if you're so inclined.
> 
> (Yes, the title of this fic is totally a reference to a line from [the Metric song by the same name](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07dZKLJoGOc) that goes "I heard you fuck through the wall.")

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [it would eat you like poison if you knew what I knew](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21017894) by [fawnlike (amainiris)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amainiris/pseuds/fawnlike)


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